VCE Testing of Very Lean Hydrogen-Air Mixtures

Hydrogen is predicted to play a large role as energy carrier as the world moves towards NetZero. Growing demand for this energy vector will require a significant increase in the production, transportation, distribution, and storage of hydrogen. Accurately modeling the dispersion, fire, and explosion hazards associated with new and existing hydrogen transportation and distribution networks will be an important component growing these networks safely. Similarly, accurate modeling the hazards at distribution facilities will become increasingly important. BakerRisk has performed a series of lean hydrogen-air vapor cloud explosion (VCE) tests as part of an internal research effort. The goal of these tests was to better understand the unconfined VCE blast loads for very lean, equivalence ratio (ER) < 0.4, hydrogen-air mixtures. This presentation will discuss the VCE test setup, results and recommended modeling approaches for hydrogen-air clouds. A case study demonstrating the impacts of using a lower explosion limit (LEL) greater than 4% on the resulting predicted VCE blast loads for pure hydrogen and hydrogen-natural gas blends will be provided.